The Internet has revolutionized the Industrial economy in a variety of ways. For instance, now business and personal affairs can be conducted in remote corners of the globe via some network link, such as phone, cable, cellular, satellite, radio frequency, etc. Moreover, the devices that support Internet transactions have been blurred such that now it is not just a computer that permits processing capabilities and connectivity to the Internet; in fact, nearly any conceivable device can connect to the Internet, such as a phone, a personal digital assistant, a car, a watch, a gaming device, a household appliance, etc.
Furthermore, there are even techniques that can address situations where a particular processing need of an enterprise or individual exceeds the existing processing capabilities of their devices. This is referred to as grid computing. Essentially, participating computers over the Internet permit processes to be executed on those computers using their excess and available capacity. This has blurred what is considered a computer, in that now a computer can be viewed as a collection of geographically dispersed processing devices that cooperate with one another to achieve a specific task. Additionally, a task that may have taken a day to complete given its complexity can now be completed in mere minutes by dispersing the processing and memory needs to a plurality of participating and cooperating processing devices over a network, such as the Internet.
Yet, to date grid computing has focused on distributed processing and has not attempted to provide any centralized and automated monitoring and management of network traffic associated with grid computing. Utilizing such capabilities will reveal a variety of security holes and support/maintenance issues in the network being evaluated.
Thus, what are needed are network evaluation grid techniques, which allow for improved management and usage of networks.